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APAP | NYC 2012, an annual event hosted by the Association Of Performing Arts Presenters that features several days of music showcases and panel discussions with leading artists and voices from the contemporary performance arts world, happens in New York City from January 6-10.

On January 5, Ars Nova Workshop's Founder/Artistic Director Mark Christman will participate in a workshop hosted by JazzTimes magazine as part of their DIY Crash Course program. Along with representatives from International Music Network, BOOM Collective, Revive Music Group and Unlimited Myles, and moderated by music writer Jim Macnie (Down Beat, Village Voice), Mark will be part of the “New Models For Jazz Performance and Touring” workshop. Click here for more information about the workshop and JazzTimes' DIY Crash Course, and be sure to RSVP on Facebook.

Also in conjuction with APAP, the Jazz Journalists Association (JJA) is hosting a Mini-Conference called Media For Audience Development featuring a series of panel discussions on building new jazz audiences using new media. On January 8, Mark will be participating in the Going Local: Getting Coverage In Local Media panel with JJA President and music writer Howard Mandel, The Local East Village editor Daniel Maurer, CapitalBop editor-in-cheif Giovanni Russonello and TimeOut New York music editor Steve Smith.

Also, Winter Jazzfest 2012 is happening in New York City that weekend. On Friday, January 6 and Saturday, January 7, dozens of performances will take place at multiple venues, including sets by Tyshawn Sorey's Oblique, Nels Cline Singers, Jason Ajemian's Highlife, Bill Laswell, Mostly Other People Do The Killing, and David Murray's Cuban Ensemble. If you go, keep an eye out for Mark!

If you're not able to make it, don't fret: ANW has plenty of jazz coming your way in 2012. We'll be kicking off the New Year on January 19 at The Rotunda with a performance by Nate Wooley Quintet Alpha. Have a great New Year's celebration, and we'll see you there!

Before we march into 2012, and ANW's exciting upcoming season of jazz and experimental music in Philadelphia, we'd like to thank you for all your support this year. Thank you. Without your generous contributions, we wouldn't have been able to present nearly 40 concerts in 2011, including our three-day Composer Portrait: Fieldwork series, our five-day AACM: Great Black Music Festival, and the unprecedented three-day series with Instant Composers Pool Orchestra.

Those were some of our favorite music moments of the year, and there are plenty more coming! We have big plans for 2012 and beyond, including bigger and better music festivals, visual arts exhibits, and the launch of the ANW archival record label.

In the meantime, ANW's season begins on January 19, 2012 with the Philadelphia debut of the Nate Wooley Quintet Alpha. Please check out the rest of our 2012 season here, and we'll soon be announcing several more concerts, including a duo that's literally going to knock your socks off. Here's a hint: Philadelphia pianist + Dutch drummer.

Ars Nova Workshop's 13th year is coming soon! We wrapped up our 2011 season in late-November with two maximum capacity concerts by Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog and a double-header with Jason Adasiewicz's Rolldown and the Claudia Quintet + 1. Thanks to everyone who came out to support ANW this year, and we wish you all a wonderful holiday season.

ANW kicks off its 2012 season on January 19th with the Philadelphia debut of the Nate Wooley Quintet Alpha at The Rotunda. In a review of the quintet's recent Brooklyn performance, The New York Times' Nate Chinen wrote that Wooley's “an improviser with a tactile, patient, interrogatory approach to his craft.” We hope you'll join us for this first concert of the new year, and Wooley's first Philadelphia appearance since last March, when he played Vox Populi with C. Spencer Yeh, Paul Lytton and Ben Hall.

Below you'll find a summary of ANW's early 2012 concert schedule. Keep an eye on our website, because we'll be announcing a few more dates very soon. For more information, and to purchase tickets, please refer to the event pages on our website. Happy holidays, and we'll see you on January 19th!

The summer's coming to an end, which means Ars Nova Workshop—Philadelphia's leading presenter of jazz and experimental music—is back. We concluded our 11th season back in June with the five-concert Great Black Music Festival celebrating the work of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) with performances by Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, and Wadada Leo Smith, and we're ready to charge into season 12 with six nights of live music by seven bands over the remaining months of 2011. It all begins this week with two stellar concerts at Philadelphia Art Alliance.

On Wednesday, September 14, renowned bassist Mark Dresser and vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Jen Shyu perform new pieces from their latest Pi Recordings release, Synastry. Then, on Friday, September 16, the Angelica Sanchez Quintet, featuring a rare stateside appearance by French guitarist Marc Ducret, present new compositions from their sophomore release, which is coming soon on the venerable Clean Feed label. Tickets are available now on the individual event pages, so be sure to pick yours up today.

Below you'll find a summary of Ars Nova Workshop's 2011 concert schedule. For further information, and to purchase tickets, please refer to the event pages. We hope to see you Wednesday and Thursday night, and many times over the next few months!

For Ars Nova Workshop's AACM: Great Black Music Festival, we've asked several leading jazz scholars and journalists to engage performers in a series of pre-concert public discussions about the history, present, and future of the AACM. On Sunday, June 12 at Settlement Music School, New York Times music writer Nate Chinen will talk with first generation AACM member Roscoe Mitchell, whose Sound Ensemble will perform following the discussion. Chinen made the following post on his blog, The Gig.

If you're reading this, you probably know it's a busy time for jazz. So I'll keep this brief. On Sunday evening at 6 p.m., I'll be moderating a conversation with saxophonist, composer and AACM heavyweight Roscoe Mitchell, at Settlement Music School in Philadelphia. The talk (which is free) will precede an 8 p.m. performance by his Sound Ensemble (which isn't). It's part of a weekend-long Mitchell residency, within a larger AACM series, presented by Ars Nova Workshop.

Roscoe Mitchell is, of course, a fiercely individual thinker and creative force, and while I haven't yet had the honor of interviewing him, I have heard him speak on a few occasions. The most memorable of these was during a symposium in Guelph, Ontario, in 2005. That was for a 40th-anniversary celebration for the AACM; during the same weekend, Mitchell also performed with the Art Ensemble of Chicago and in duo with Pauline Oliveros. (I wrote about it in JazzTimes.)

Incidentally, the other night I was at the Vision Festival speaking with Yulun Wang of Pi Recordings, which has released albums by the Art Ensemble as well as Mitchell's collaboration with two fellow AACM stalwarts, pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and George Lewis. The subject of AACM commemoration came up, and I naturally mentioned the classic John Hughes film Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Yulun didn't know what I was talking about, which led me to believe that this bit of trivia might not be as well-known as I'd thought.

For Ars Nova Workshop's AACM: Great Black Music Festival, we've asked several leading jazz scholars and journalists to engage performers in a series of pre-concert public discussions about the history, present, and future of the AACM. On Monday, June 13 at the Maas Building, writer (Jazz Times, New York City Jazz Record) and Queens College jazz history lecturer David R. Adler will talk with young AACM members Mike Reed and Jeff Parker, whose duo performance will precede the discussion and a performance of Henry Threadgill's “Background” by the Collide Saxophone Quartet. We're pleased to share with you a short essay written on Reed and Parker by Adler for Ars Nova Workshop.

It’s safe to say that Muhal Richard Abrams, Phil Cohran and other AACM founders weren’t just out for themselves when they launched the organization in the mid-1960s. Rather, they sought to create a legacy of artistic freedom, an example for new generations. Guitarist Jeff Parker and drummer Mike Reed, standing at the forefront of today’s energized Chicago improvising scene, are an embodiment of that legacy.

Parker has issued such fine recordings as Like-Coping and The Relatives. He’s distinguished himself as a member of Tortoise, Isotope 217 and other head-turning, hard-to-classify bands. He’s also worked with AACM stalwarts Ernest Dawkins and the late Fred Anderson, the Chicago Underground in its various forms, Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble and Matana Roberts’ Chicago Project, not to mention the Brian Blade Fellowship, Joshua Redman’s Elastic Band, the Scott Amendola Band and more.

Thoroughly at home with rock, blues, straightahead swing and open-form experimentation, Parker brings a dry, biting guitar sound to his musical encounters, including his provocative duo with Mike Reed. Both Reed and Parker are members of Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra, appearing together on such releases as Bill Dixon with Exploding Star Orchestra and We Are All From Somewhere Else. Their duo music hails from the same universe: rough-edged, percussive, sonically inventive, yet marked by a pared-down intimacy.

For Ars Nova Workshop's AACM: Great Black Music Festival, we've asked several leading jazz scholars and journalists to engage performers in a series of pre-concert public discussions about the history, present, and future of the AACM. At 6pm on Saturday, June 4 at Philadelphia Art Alliance, Sun Ra and Alan Lomax biographer and Columbia University professor John Szwed will talk with first generation AACM member Wadada Leo Smith, whose solo performance following the discussion will kick off the 5-concert festival. We're pleased to share with you a short essay written on the AACM by Szwed for Ars Nova Workshop.

On the mythic map of jazz that we have inherited there are two coasts, one river, and three cities - New Orleans, Chicago, and New York. It's a cruel simplification of a very complex history, but one that's hard to forget. A few years back I was thinking of that jazz geography when I travelled between those three cities over a short stretch of time and got to hear some music in each of them.

In New York, the audience at the Vanguard was appreciative, urbane, and politely knowing. And why not, the music is no longer connected to any particular community or ethnicity, and New York clubs are now more like a jazz festival, with groups from everywhere in the world passing through. In New Orleans, on the other hand, jazz seemed to me something like the tropical air or the drinks: it had always been there, and you breathed, drank, and listened. Music in that city is still neighborhood-based, and remains, in spite of Katrina, somewhat racially determined and tied to other forms of community music - soul, blues, funk . . .

In Chicago one experience sticks with me. I arrived just in time to see the Art Ensemble of Chicago make a widely publicized concert return to Mandel Hall. The crowd that night was diverse, all high energy and wild enthusiasm for the music. At the end of the evening, Roscoe Mitchell stepped to the microphone, introduced the individual musicians, then said with a bow, "Collectively, we are the Art Ensemble of Chicago." When that last word was uttered the audience leaped to its feet with a triumphant roar! "Hog Butcher for the World," Carl Sandburg called Chicago, "Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads . . . Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders" In the hall that night it felt something like that.

For Ars Nova Workshop's AACM: Great Black Music Festival, we've asked several leading jazz scholars and journalists to engage performers in a series of pre-concert public discussions about the history, present, and future of the AACM. At 6pm on Sunday, June 5 at Christ Church Neighborhood Theatre, award-winning jazz journalist and author Francis Davis will talk with first generation AACM member Henry Threadgill, whose Zooid ensemble will perform following the discussion. We're pleased to share with you a short essay written on Threadgill and the AACM by Davis for Ars Nova Workshop.[NOTE: We apologize for the inconvenience, but the pre-concert discussion with Francis Davis and Henry Threadgill is cancelled. The performance by Henry Threadgill & Zooid will still begin at 8pm.]

Even now, hard on fifty years since the organization’s first stirrings in Muhal Richard Abrams’s Experimental Orchestra in Chicago in the early ‘60s, some still deny the music made by the AACM’s charter members a place in jazz tradition by virtue of it being too “European”—too infected by the procedures of such postwar classical avant-gardists as Karlheinz Stockhauen and John Cage to qualify as a logical outgrowth of Ellington, bebop, or even free jazz. (Never mind that Cage was as American as Jelly Roll Morton or Charles Ives, this peculiar strain of American exceptionalism obeys no logic but its own). Or the same body of music, occasionally even the same piece of music, is disparaged as willfully primitive, a deliberate affront to jazz’s ongoing intellectual evolution.

These criticisms would be ridiculous even if they didn’t nicely cancel each other out. Yet taken together, don’t they somehow amount to exculpatory fact? Because what was so innovative and exciting about those first albums to draw the world’s attention to the AACM—what identified this music as something more than Coltrane or Albert Ayler with a Chicago accent—was a cross-cultural bricolage, a bringing together of pan-African ritual and rhythmic primacy with something drawing on both Cagean indeterminacy and Schoenbergian post-tonality.

Presented in Philadelphia by Ars Nova Workshop from June 4-13, AACM | Great Black Music is a festival of performances and public discussions with scholars and writers celebrating the past and present work of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM).

Founded in Chicago in 1965, the AACM's motto is “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future,” and, as their mission proclaims, they've been “nurturing, performing, and recording serious, original music” ever since. The self-help collective, which converged through multiple ensemble configurations including the Art Ensemble of Chicago, was formed to provide avant-garde composers and performers a platform to elevate their work within a power structure hostile to black experimental musicians.

Forty-six years after its founding, the organization continues to collectively bargain with venues and record labels, initiate music education programs in inner city schools, and carve out a unique creative identity and space of their own. Named after the AACM's motto, the festival begins June 4 with a solo performance by trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and a public discussion led by John Szwed, and over the next two weeks there will be concerts by Henry Threadgill's Zooid, a Composer Portrait: Roscoe Mitchell component with the S.E.M. Ensemble performing chamber works by Mitchell, Mitchell and Evan Parker in duo, and Mitchell and the Sound Ensemble, the Collide Saxophone Quartet performing Threadgill's “Background,” and a duo with Mike Reed and Jeff Parker. Many of these events will feature pre-concert public discussions with music scholars, writers, and educators Francis Davis, Nate Chinen, and David Adler.

A summary of the events appears below. For additional information on the artists and events, and to purchase tickets, please see the individual event pages on the ANW website.

Sunday, June 5 at Christ Church Neighborhood House (20 N. American Street)
6pm | A public discussion with Henry Threadgill and music writer Francis Davis
8pm | A performance by Henry Threadgill's Zooid[NOTE: We apologize for the inconvenience, but the pre-concert discussion with Francis Davis and Henry Threadgill is cancelled. The performance by Henry Threadgill & Zooid will still begin at 8pm.]

Sunday, June 12 at Settlement Music School (416 Queen Street)
Composer Portrait: Roscoe Mitchell
6pm | A public discussion with Roscoe Mitchell and music writer Nate Chinen
8pm | A performance by Roscoe Mitchell and the Sound Ensemble

Monday, June 13 at The Maas Building (1325 Randolph Street)
8pm | A performance by the Mike Reed-Jeff Parker Duo
9pm | A public discussion with music writer David Adler
10pm | The Collide Quartet perform Henry Threadgill's “Background”

Ars Nova Workshop's Three Nights in Philadelphia with the Instant Composers Pool Orchestra began last night. Taken from the performance, the video below shows a bird-like Tristan Honsinger conducting the orchestra. It continues tonight when, at 8pm, the tentet will take the stage with guest vocalist Fay Victor. Then, on Sunday, members of the ICP Orchestra will join jazz critic and author Kevin Whitehead for a pre-concert public dicussion at 6pm. Phawker interviewed Whitehead to talk about his new book, Why Jazz?, and he said the following about the Instant Composers Pool.

"In the late ’60s, musicians in a few western European countries started developing their own improvised music styles, informed by jazz but branching off. The Dutch contingent were the jolliest, and included pianist Misha Mengelberg and drummer Han Bennink. They started the ICP Orchestra in the 1970s but it really took off in the ’80s, when most of the present 10-tet came together. Misha wrote most of the music, which could sound very jazzy or like crackpot Mozart, and also arranged pieces by his American faves, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols. Like Ellington, he saw the appeal of a band of individuals with varied backgrounds, and distinctive, contrasting styles as soloists. He also taught the musicians little games and strategies they could use to subvert his authority as bandleader.

ICP can sound like a miniature big band or a chamber group, as musicians move from rearranged Ellington into a raucous or quiet free improvisation and then a Mengelberg fanfare or a bit of spontaneous theater. It’s slippery music, walking a line between chaos and sublime lyricism, and they have the damnedest way of changing things up just before they wear out. It’s really quite amazing, and often very funny, and any fan of jazz now or new music or improvised performance would be crazy to miss them when they come to town. Philadelphia, this weekend, say."

Ars Nova Workshop is a Philadelphia nonprofit jazz and experimental music presenting organization. ANW informs, inspires, and challenges listeners to elevate the role of jazz, improvisation, and experimental music in contemporary culture. ANW events provide a forum for discourse, emergent trends in contemporary music, and unique forms of cultural exchange, while nurturing a diverse community for innovative music.